Google Apps is an awesome tool for small businesses. It allows businesses to outsource their e-mail server IT maintenance to Google’s servers. Instead of having to rely on your company’s internal Microsoft Exchange servers (and licensing) to handle your company’s e-mail, you set this up and viola! Problem solved.
The problem that many people have with switching to a new system is the learning curve involved. G-mail is a little bit different than most web based e-mail systems in that it keeps track of your messages in a threaded view – meaning that replies to one message are kept with the original message.
Google Apps allows each user to also use Microsoft Outlook to connect to Google’s e-mail servers (using secure encryption methods) to send and receive e-mail just as they would with a standard e-mail account in Outlook.
A few settings need to be made to your Microsoft Outlook to make it function correctly with your g-mail email address (or Google Apps e-mail).
Your incoming email server should be set to pop.gmail.com using SSL on port 995.
Your outgoing email server should be set to smtp.gmail.com using SSL on port 465.
Your user name should be your Google Apps email address (yourname@yourdomain.com) – this is also the correct settings if you are using a gmail.com email account.
